Evolutionary Basic Democracy

A Critical Overture

J. Gagnon

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137338655
• eBook ISBN: 9781137338662
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

No one in this world truly understands what democracy means. We operate democracy only through best guesses. This uncertainty has caused, and continues to cause, significant political troubles. This book offers a way forward. It provides a new tool that will allow us to understand democracy for the entire planet and all of humanity.

1

The Subalterns and Unknowns of Democracy

Abstract: Two bodies of literature on democracy are described in this chapter. The first concerns anthropocentric works that claim wider and different origins for democracy. The history of democracy is more complex than we currently think it is. The second body of literature described concerns nonhuman democracy. The chapter offers a table that surveys mammals, birds, fish, insects, slime-moulds and bacteria. Biologists argue that these different species have specific democratic practices. The chapter describes that physicists and mathematicians use the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’ in their works. It asks whether democracy or democratic things had a role to play in the origins of life.

Gagnon, Jean-Paul. Evolutionary Basic Democracy: A Critical Overture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137338662.

This chapter aims to highlight two specific bodies of literature. The first body of literature we look at gains focus in Chapter 2 and the second in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 will discuss both bodies. This results in the introduction to evolutionary basic democracy (EBD) as a theory. Of central importance is my argument that a little-known but important body of literature exists. This body covers democracies in different places during, for example, democratic Hellas, the English Revolution or the birth of the United Nations. I consider this to be a subaltern of the discourse. Further below I discuss a key point regarding hybridity and how this affects foundational claims. But to get to these two literatures we must first explain where they originate. Paine and Muhlberger (1993: 25, 26) help to set the tone:

Two factors have allowed historians, political theorists, and others to represent democratic theory or practice as uniquely western phenomena: ignorance, and the concentration of historical research on the largest and best recorded institutions. That many historians know little about history outside of Europe and North America needs no demonstration . . . [Historians looking to places and times outside of the West] have seen only a mass of churlish and intractable peasants, too dumb to understand voting or the principle of human equality, now or ever.

There is a dominant body of literature that places the origins of democracy undoubtedly within ancient Hellas. It is to this body that Paine and Muhlberger (1993: 25, 26) address their critique. This literature argues that democracy after Greece was carried into the present by the items on the following list:

the Roman Republic (Ikeskamp and Heitmann-Gordon, 2010: 4, 20; Millar, 1998: 4);

the ecclesiastical practices of certain religions like Christianity and Islam (Papanikolaou, 2003: 95; Khatab and Bouma, 2007);

the decision-making practices of Italian City-States (Jones, 1997);

Arabic scholars (al-Jabri, 2008; Abdalla and Rane, 2011);

Germanic and Swiss customs like the Märzfeld or Landsgemeinde (Head, 1995; Mellor, 2010: 15);

Nordic things – pronounced ‘tings’ (Boulhosa, 2011);

European wieches, sejms and folkmoots along with their cognates (Barnwell and Mostert, 2003);

guilds of all sorts (Arjomand, 2004: 324);

the Isle of Man’s Tynwald which is thought to be the world’s oldest parliament (Edge and Pearce, 2006);

Ireland’s Tuáth (Canny, 2010);

the elisate of the Basque nation (Ugarte, 2009);

the rise of aristocracies from the Balkans and Eastern Europe to Ireland and Iceland that devolved power from autocrats and monarchs (Congleton, 2011);

the seemingly sacred Magna Charta (Wood, 1969: 537);

the innovations during the English, French and American revolutions (Gill, 2008);

New England town hall meetings (Robinson, 2011);

the 20th century’s successive triumphs of democracy over fascism, totalitarianism, communism and other non-democratic rule (Huntington, 1991);

and the 21st century’s e-democracy which some argue brought the demoi more transparency and accountability among other things (Insua and French, 2010).

Even though the list above is over-simplistic we should consider that this story is true insofar as the aforementioned items are actually about specific types of western Eurocentric democracy. And these democracies differ from one another in a number of ways. For example, there was not a gradual rise of aristocrats across the world. Not even in Europe. Nothing led to the dissolution of some terrible autocratic age because that homogeneous time did not exist. As far as we can tell, depending on the society observed, there were large numbers of aristocratic strenghtenings and weakenings depending on who was alive when, what transpired and how. In short, polities differ from each other in history but suffer the homogenizing effects that certain historical narratives have.

Black (2009: 1–2) is a good example of this homogenizing narrative. He argues that:

Sociology has long been inter-cultural. World history is at last coming into its own. But in the history of ideas, globalization still has some way to go. While histories of Western political thought, usually starting with the ancient Greeks, abound, there are few histories of political thought in other civilizations. And there is none of the ancient world taken as a whole. This is astounding, when one considers that the period covered in this book was the most eventful in the whole history of political thought: it was then that political philosophy was invented (independently) in China and Greece; political science was invented in Greece; statecraft in China and India. Democracy and liberty (as every schoolboy or -girl perhaps knows) began in ancient Greece. Israel led directly to Judaism, indirectly to Christianity and Islam.

Black (2009) recognized that the globalization of ancient political history is only just beginning. But as the reader will see many of the claims Black makes above are patently false. This is especially evident regarding his argument that Greece invented political science, liberty and democracy. His book paints a picture of specific ancient places in ways that appear dramatically myopic. Black argues that Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China were devoid of democracy. In light of recent evidence, his arguments are too broad and fall to pieces.

The same can be argued about the rise and fall of non-elites. Head (1995), Boulhosa (2011) and Barnwell and Mostert (2003) tell that the strength of non-elites grew or fell depending on how politics evolved. A non-elite assembly on the Hungarian steppes might be forced to give power to a regional autocrat. But a different assembly may not face these troubles because a mountain range protects it from more powerful militaries.

The list above is not exhaustive as the definition of specific bodies in the literature is subjective. The list itself might actually be too broad. The dominant literature is seen as a myopic, parochial and sometimes racist. Some say that it is an orientalist narrative. This is why a different scholar like Paine (with Muhlberger, 1993) would probably remove Nordic things and northern European non-elite assemblies like folkmoots or wieches from the list. He would note that they are not on average included in the bulk of democracy’s history. Keane (2012a) would probably remove Arabic scholars as they were and still are ignored in the dominant historical record of democracy. Leaving things and Arabic scholars on that list might give unfair virtue to a narrative that has otherwise colonized the discourse of democracy.

A good explanation about why some view this narrative so unhappily comes from Paine. The French, German and English literatures during the 19th and 20th centuries were conservative. They were blatantly opposed to the idea of democracies that differed from ancient Athens or its north Atlantic revolutionary origins. Anything else in that western European time-space could not be democratic because Greece invented it and Europe carried the torch forward. The blinders came onto the discourse early and we have only just begun removing them. Indeed, Thomas (1990: 310) supports this point in his discussion of the poet William Wordsworth:

[For Wordsworth] to speak thus in praise of democracy and democratic principles, even so late as 1820, was a bold move. The word democracy, even then, still had very negative connotations, for most people, of violence and radicalism and mob rule. But Wordsworth was not afraid to use the word, for he was one of the most profound and entire believers in democracy who ever lived and wrote. In 1794, when he was barely 24, he announced boldly, even defiantly, ‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall for ever continue’.

Democracy in this example is held in contempt due to the contemporaneous belief that it was dangerous or distasteful. Thomas’ example helps to illustrate how humans can hold democracy sacred or profane depending on how they understand the concept.

Others like Elstub (2010), Levy (2010), Curato (2012) and Marktanner and Nasr (2009) might add to the list. They would cite the recent growth in popularity of deliberative and de-militarized democracies. Elstub, Levy and Curato argue that deliberative democracy is a core practice for any democracy to work. Levy, for example, details how deliberation fosters better public law. For Marktanner and Nasr, militaries are possibly anathema to democracy. This is a position that I agree with as I would prefer to see the enlisted and reservists placed in border security, police, search and rescue, and to continue building the international corps of peacekeepers.

In short, the dominant literature on democracy’s evolution is not strictly defined. Nor do the literatures I associate with each item on the list necessarily get along. Curato (2011) for example would not argue that democracy originates solely from the ‘West’. But we can make a general statement that the bulk of the literature argues that one or more of the items I list above are essential for democracy to exist.

An easy-to-spot problem is that the narrative in this major body of literature is a western Eurocentric one. Even eastern European or Russian scholars are not typically given any credit toward innovations in democracy. In the case of Arabic scholars, certain historic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: A New Analytic Tool
• 1  The Subalterns and Unknowns of Democracy
• 2  Arguments for Evolutionary Democracy
• 3  Arguments against Evolutionary Democracy
• 4  Schrdingers Democracy
• Works Cited
• Index